Month: September 2014

I’m tired of being behind, so I’m going to catch up in one fell swoop. It almost makes sense because these books are kind of related since they all involve religion, though of very, very different sorts. So here’s my Lazy Rundown of Three Almost-But-Not-Really Related Books So They Aren’t Hanging over My Head Anymore.

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, happened because it was available on OverDrive when I needed another audiobook because puppy. I read and enjoyed Year of Wonders, about the bubonic plague, several years ago, and I was expecting another reasonably good historical novel, which I got. People of the Book is about an old book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, and how it survived. Hanna Heath, a rare book expert, is asked to go to Sarajevo to preserve it, and through backstories related to her investigations, we find out, in reverse order, when and how the book was made and how it survived when it should have been destroyed by the Inquisition and the Nazis, among others. It’s a really interesting look into Jewish history of which I only had (and still have) a vague knowledge. There was too much unnecessary romance for my taste, and this is generally Not My Kind of Book, but I enjoyed it well enough. If it hadn’t been an audiobook, though, I doubt I would have finished it because parts were slow and I’m generally not good at historical novels.

Next up is Unholy Night, by Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the like. I don’t think I realized that until I was well into Unholy Night. This is another case of OverDrive Audiobook Convenience, and I enjoyed this one. It’s a (mostly) comedy about how the Three Wise Men got together and saved baby Jesus and his parents. Balthazar, the protagonist, is a well-known thief, called the Antioch Ghost, who has sparked Herod’s particular hatred. Balthazar cheats, kills, lies, and occasionally gets caught, leading to ridiculous escapes and adventures across the desert. He experiences visions that lead him to that fateful night in Bethlehem, where he saves Jesus from Herod and eventually sees him safely into Egypt despite many attempted captures. I thought I might be getting into something that’s sacrilegious, but it’s not, so don’t expect to be offended if you lean that way. It’s a fun and funny adventure novel, and it’s totally worth a read.

Finally, we have The God Delusion. I’ve been meaning to read some Richard Dawkins for a while. It’s good that this is part of a multi-entry because I don’t have much to say about it because my beliefs are not the internet’s business, and it’s really hard to talk about this book without saying whether I agree with him or not. But I’m not going to say! What I will say is that Dawkins makes some interesting arguments. He says at the beginning of the book that this book’s purpose is to turn believers into atheists. I’d be interested to know if that’s worked even once because, even as he says, religious belief is so ingrained in personality by the time anyone gets old enough to question it logically. From the outset, Dawkins has a huge hill to climb, and he doesn’t help with his tone: he is a very arrogant man, and he comes off as bitter to the point that his non-objectivity dampens the effectiveness of his arguments. So. Do with that very vague review what you will.

And with that, I’ve hit my annual fifty books! …in September. Last year, I think I made 61, and I might or might not go farther than that. I’ve considered taking the rest of the year off from blogging, but that’s not likely to happen, especially now that I’m caught up. Most of the books I’ve finished lately have been audiobooks because puppy. Right now, I’m in the middle of The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell‘s new novel, and that’ll take a while to finish. There’s also my current audiobook, Authority, the second of the Southern Reach trilogy. And there’s the thesis, which needs to take more of my time than it currently is, which means some Don DeLillo is (sadly?) in my future.

And, finally, it’s Fall Baking Season! I’m seriously considering adding some recipes to this blog, though that will be difficult because of my non-aesthetically pleasing kitchen. Anyway, I made some super-tasty apple-pumpkin muffins the other day.

I only took a picture of the end product, not the various steps I took in getting there, so I’ll just add a link to the recipe I used.

Annihilation reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with the explanatory monologue at the end. I could hear Rod Serling’s voice in my head. I think that’s why I liked Annihilation so much.

It’s about the twelfth expedition to Area X, a mysterious plot of land that has been under investigation for thirty years because of mysterious occurrences. This expedition includes four women: an anthropologist, a psychologist, a surveyor, and a biologist. They are never named, and the biologist narrates in journal-form. The situation seems weird from the beginning. They discover a tunnel into the ground, which the biologist insists on calling a tower, and descend to find a scrawl of mysterious and terrifying words. The biologist gets close enough to discover that they’re some sort of fungus, and inhales, infecting herself with…something. The biologist discovers that the psychologist, who leads the group, has been giving posthypnotic commands to them all along, but this fungus has made the biologist impervious. She goes on to discover some of the mysteries of Area X and what it does to her and her fellow expeditioners.

In a way, Annihilation reminded me of Bird Box, which might be another reason I liked it. The reader sees the world through the biologist’s tunnel-vision, affected somehow by that fungus, but she doesn’t know how, and she keeps it a secret from the other women. We’re kept in the dark, waiting for her to write something down that makes sense of things, like discovering this area as she does.

Annihilation is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer. All three books were published this year, only a couple of months apart and only in paperback. That seems like a strange move, though they were first self-published, I think, so maybe it makes sense? Anyway, I’ll be reading the second and third, Authority and Acceptance in short order because I’m entirely hooked.

Shakespeare was not nearly as enthusiastic:

In other news, I finally finished uploading photos from my one-day whirlwind tour of Washington, DC. Here’s the full set.

At the beginning of this year, I made the decision to stick with book-themed posts rather than make my random deviations into food and photography, and, well, I’m breaking that rule here because I want to Share the Wealth.

Alligators are Zelda’s very favorite treat. She pricks up her ears every time she hears the word, and she’ll willingly walk into her kennel and sit down to enjoy one of these tasty treats. I make them twice a month, or so. One batch makes around 85, but they disappear very quickly. I like that I know what’s in them and that they don’t contain soylent dog or some equally unappetizing substance. Sure, lots of people disapprove of feeding dogs wheat, but Zelda enjoys it, and I don’t think it’s much worse for her than it is for humans (have you read Wheat Belly?).

So here goes: How to Make Alligators!

You’ll need all of 4 ingredients. You probably have them in your kitchen right now.

Preheat your oven to 350. In a medium bowl, mix up the oats and wheat flour:

Then, get your peanut butter and dump it in the bottom of another bowl (I use a stand mixer, but a spoon will probably work).

Pour in your hot tap water and mix it until it’s reasonably blended. It’ll look kind of gross.

Next, pour in the dry ingredients and mix it all up. You’ll get a nice, thick dough.

Roll it out to 1/4- or 1/8-inch thick and cut it into the shapes of your choosing. I use an alligator cookie cutter my stepmother gave me several years ago. If you absolutely hate cookie cutters, roll it out and cut it into squares with a pizza cutter. Your dog won’t mind.

Put your squares or alligators or mustaches or whatever on a cookie sheet and bake them for about 25 minutes.

They come out of the oven looking almost exactly like they did going in.

Once they’re cool, store them in an airtight container or freeze them. They’ll probably last forever in either case since no perishable ingredients are involved.

Zelda loves them – except when I try to capture said love on video. Then, she’s totally nonchalant.

I only read Doomed because I own (won) it, so I’ve been meaning to read it only for that reason, and it was immediately available on OverDrive when I needed another audiobook to read. Which means that I didn’t even read the copy I won. Anyway, I’d been putting it off because I didn’t remember liking Damned, though I apparently did. It’s funny how quickly I forget books and what I thought about them. Which is why I keep this blog – but that’s neither here nor there.

In this installment of Palahniuk’s Divine Comedy, thirteen-year-old Madison ends up stranded on Earth. She’d made a reasonably comfortable place for herself in Hell, but the Universe had other plans for her. She’s somehow supposed to reconcile God and Satan. But that doesn’t exactly happen yet. I imagine it will in the third book of the trilogy. Here, she’s a ghost, getting into trouble on Earth and finding out exactly what’s going on with her parents. She meets her dead grandparents and tells stories about their involvement in her life and death. Things Happen – this time involving a new religion and an entirely plastic continent floating on the ocean, composed of styrofoam and similar societal discards.

Like Damned, Doomed is funny, but that’s its only saving grace. It’s certainly not as good. I’ll read the third one just because I’ve read these two, and I’m vaguely interested in what happens to Madison and her family.

A bit of a warning: if you have a weak stomach, this is not the book for you. There’s a long scene (45 minutes of audio, or so) involving a glory hole in a truck stop and what Madison (at thirteen years old?) thinks is a big piece of dog poo. It’s not pretty. If you’ve read Palahniuk before, though, this is just par for the course.

In non-book news, I got mad enough at Apple because my iPhone 5 kept breaking that I went over to Verizon and bought a Samsung Galaxy S5. I was worried that I might regret it, but it appears to have been a fantastic decision. I’m considering writing an entire post about the glories of Android.

There’s also, of course, the puppy. She got first photo honors with my new phone:

She’s starting to look more like a dog than a puppy, which is a bit disconcerting. She’s so big!

After I finished Facing the Music last year, I didn’t see myself becoming a huge Larry Brown fan. That short story collection is good enough, but it’s not spectacular and no way near as intriguing as the man himself. Joe, though! Joe is a great novel, and now I’m entirely won over. (Could you tell from the TWO Larry Brown books I found and purchased at the Centenary Book Bazaar?)

I think I picked it up because I saw a trailer for the recent movie and then realized who wrote it. I haven’t seen the movie and might not bother because it can’t be as good (though I doubt it’s an abomination like the new The Giver film, but I digress). Here is said trailer:

Joe is about, well, Joe, who lives in backwoods Mississippi and works in the logging business. He’s sort of a hick, likes to drink, has lady trouble, and is disliked by the local sheriff’s deputies. He does well enough and lives comfortably. Then, a (probably) 14-year-old kid named Gary shows up with his father, asking for a job. Joe hires them for the day to poison trees so they can be replaced by pines. Gary works hard, but his father doesn’t do much of anything, and after they’re paid (and fired) at the end of the day, Gary’s father hits him and takes his money and goes to the store to buy (and steal) alcohol. This father is generally a bad sort, bordering on Cormac McCarthy-grade evil. He kills a homeless man for his alcohol and cash, and things just get worse by the end of the book. One rainy night, Gary shows up at Joe’s house, asking to work, and Joe hires him. Life continues, and Things Happen.

Maybe I like this book so much because I grew up in the general vicinity, and I know people like Joe. What’s funny is that most of the people I know like him live way up in South Dakota. They’re good people, and they work hard. Joe is a good guy.

I almost want to see the movie because Nicholas Cage seems like a strange choice for Joe. If Jeff Bridges was a few years younger, he’d be perfect, but the character is 43 or 44, and Jeff Bridges is, well, significantly older. But Nicholas Cage? I think it got good reviews.

Joe falls in the top five books I’ve read this year, and Larry Brown was one of the best contemporary southern writers. It’s a pity he died so young.

Here’s another book I decided to read because I like the cover. Sometimes that works out well. Lotería wasn’t one of those times. I probably would have continued to pass it over, as I’ve done for months, except that the audiobook was immediately available on Overdrive and only 3 hours long. It was mostly a waste of those three hours, though it kept me mildly curious about what was really going on.

Luz, a young girl, writes her story in a journal, each entry based on a lotería card. She mostly tells it backward, and we find out early that she’s in some sort of group home because something terrible happened to her family. Then we skip backward, hearing events leading up to this tragedy, stories about her alcoholic and abusive father, her sister, and the rest of her family.

It’s a short book and not all that interesting. I think reading it would have worked out better because of the (hopefully colorful) lotería cards spaced throughout.

The ending was corny as happens with a lot of family dramas – which I why I rarely read them. Lotería is okay, at best. You might like it if you enjoy relatively mundane family dramas. Meh.

More interesting was the annual Centenary Book Bazaar, my favorite local event. Once a year, Centenary fills their Gold Dome with donated books and very low prices, and I brave the crowd to get some amazing deals on lightly used books.

This’ll be another quick one even though The Glass Sentenceis really, really good and deserves more of a review.

I think this novel ended up in my to-read list after it popped up on one of the ubiquitous beginning-of-season blog lists put out by The Millions or the like. I read the short post, then the blurb on Goodreads. It sounded like My Kind of Book. And this time, it was!

The Glass Sentence is a YA fantasy adventure book about a girl named Sophia and her uncle Shadrack, a cartologer (okay, mapmaker). Several years before timelines had been split along geographical lines around the world in an event they call The Great Disruption. One area might be 19th-century society while not too far away, there’d be dinosaurs. An interesting idea. This new version of the world is still being mapped by people like Shadrack: adventuring mapmakers, including Sophia’s parents, who disappeared somewhere halfway around the world. Sophia doesn’t even know what time they’re in. The government of New Occident, where Sophia lives, has decided to close the borders, and her parents don’t have their papers to get back in, so Sophia and Shadrack decide to go looking for them before that happens. When Shadrack is suddenly kidnapped and taken somewhere north. Sophia, now on her own and with only a few clues and a map left by Shadrack, ends up on a train headed south to figure out what happened to Shadrack and her parents. Things Continue to Happen.

My biggest (and, really, only) complaint about this book is that there seem to be too many Things Happening – and in ways that seem ill-timed and a bit awkwardly done. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this adventure. The closest books I can compare it to are Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, which I also loved (though with the religious agenda replaced with a political one, but meh). It’s a dark adventure fantasy that only gets darker and more adventurous the farther you get into it. I read it really quickly because I didn’t want to put it down. It really is a fun novel.

I’m generally not a huge fan of YA series, but I’m instantly hooked on this one. The Glass Sentence is the first of a trilogy that Goodreads is calling The Mapmakers Trilogy. The next one is called The Golden Specific, according to Goodreads, and it will be released next year. I can’t wait!